Software Testing or The Bugs’ Nightmare

Software development is not error-free. For decades, bugs –including physical ones– have become a significant development problem requiring major maintenance efforts. Even in some cases, solving bugs led to increment them. One of the main reasons for bug’s prominence is their ability to hide. Finding them is difficult and costly in terms of time and resources. However, software testing made significant progress identifying them by using different strategies that combine knowledge from every single part of the program. This paper humbly reviews some different approaches from software testing that discover bugs automatically and presents some different state-of-the-art methods and tools currently used in this area. It covers three testing strategies: search-based methods, symbolic execution, and fuzzers. It also provides some income about the application of diversity in these areas, and common and future challenges on automatic test generation that still need to be addressed.

Methods and means of production generation of tests on computer disciplines

The article describes the problem of automatic test generation, which is important in the modern education system, especially in distance learning. Various developments in this area have been considered. The development of new methods and means of generating precisely test tasks has been submitted. In order to reduce the complexity and time in the course of developing tests on computer disciplines, a new type of the test task template has been produces using the production rules specified by the teacher. They make it possible to generate tests from a group of such templates (test template) suitable to be imported into the Moodle distance learning system. The development of a module for the Moodle system provides generating tests from templates directly at the time of testing and allows to create a test template instead of writing all the options for this test in hand, which should greatly facilitate the work and save the teacher’s time. The algorithm for generating a test task and examples of ready-made templates on the topics “Operating Systems” and “Python” have been presented. The proposed approach can be used in the teacher’ work as a tool for test training depending on its purpose and the nature of the discipline studied.